Family Romance

by John Lanchester

  Bill went from a highly structured work environment with long hours and a built-in social life, in a city where he had lived most of his life, to a Norfolk village. I recently went back to that village, and the revelation that hit me with great force was: what were they thinking? To go from a life spent in the tropics, most of it in one of the world’s great metropolises, to a sleepy, isolated, insular, literally and metaphorically cold piece of nowhere – what were they thinking? True, Lannie had, a year or so before, moved from her beloved adopted home in Cornwall to a small flat in Trowse, a suburb of Norwich – and that was also part of this arbitrary relocation to Norfolk. (Lannie’s great friends at her new flat were the air stewardesses who lived in the identical flat next door and flew out of Norwich Airport. This was back in the days when being an air hostess was inconceivably glamorous. They were incredibly sweet to her and occasionally used to have envy-inducing parties, which I could hear through the thin walls.)

  The fact that Bill saw much more of Lannie was the big positive about retiring to Norfolk. He now saw more of her than he had since he was evacuated from Hong Kong in July 1940. But Lannie had had a heart attack in 1979 and her health was not good. In February 1980 I was acting, very badly – no, make that very, very badly – as Jack in the school production of The Importance of Being Earnest. My parents came to see it. This in itself was a big deal for me, because it was the first school play they had ever been to see and the first time either of them had seen me act. Afterwards they came to talk to me in the cloakroom. My father told me that he’d been with Lannie that afternoon – she had called them and asked them to come over because she wasn’t feeling well.

  ‘We were sitting on the sofa,’ Dad said. ‘Then Lannie gave a kind of start and she died. I’m sorry.’

  I don’t remember feeling anything. In my clueless eighteen-year-old way, I wasn’t even particularly surprised. Lannie was old and old people did die. The funeral was a few days later. Lannie was buried in the cemetery in Norwich. I had the afternoon off school. We never discussed our feelings about her death. Now, looking back, I think it hit my father very hard.

  This grief compounded Bill’s other difficulties. The main one was that he was entirely unprepared for retirement. As a lively-minded man with many interests, no doubt he thought he would be free of the intellectual under-employment that can blight life after work; he had lived mostly in his head for many years, and probably assumed retirement would be more of the same. He began to study electronics on a two-year course at Norwich Technical College, pursuing an interest he had had for years and, characteristically, wanting to find things out from first principles. (The other mature student doing the course was twenty-four.) When he bought a BBC computer, one of the first affordable consumer models in the UK, he wanted to know how to program it and how it worked, software and hardware, from the bare machine code up. I said, ‘But what can it do? Aren’t you more interested in the things it can do? Who cares how it works?’ He shrugged. ‘Difference of approach,’ he said.

  Bill looked after the garden and set up a mesh net to keep coypu out of the vegetable patch. Coypu were an introduced species that had escaped into the wild, after the bankruptcy of a fur farm in the 1930s, and were now destroying Norfolk’s dykes by burrowing into them. The coypu is a two-foot-long rodent with unforgettable orangey-red front teeth; at night our local ones made eerie, human-sounding screaming noises. (They’ve been eradicated now, following a government programme in the late 1980s.) Bill joined the local branch of MENSA and discovered that a typical evening’s meeting involved sitting in the pub discussing whether or not to have a pizza and then going to see Eraserhead instead. He turned down a retainer from the bank because he wanted to be free to apply for other work; he did go for one job, as bursar of a Cambridge college, but he didn’t get it. He studied the stock market and made investments, not just for the fun of it but for the income to supplement his pension. He was bored out of his mind.

  Dad and me on the walls of York in 1982

  And then he died. Does that seem too sudden? It did to me. He was fifty-seven and I was twenty-one, in my third year at university. The summer holiday before his death, in 1983, I had taken him out on the canoe that was my great source of happiness at Alderfen – a neighbour and I would spend hours and hours on the small dykes, the river and the local Broad, the most excitingly wild and natural place that I, a city boy, had known. On some days I would see a kingfisher that lived near where we kept the canoe: the electric-blue flash of its wings, so startlingly vivid amid all the greens and greys, would, whenever I saw it, be the high spot of my day. I hadn’t known before that a natural phenomenon could be the high spot of a day. At the end of our narrow, overhung, near-secret dyke mooring, you could turn right and head to the Broad, or left and explore the narrow, shallow, shifting waterways, impassable to any normal boat. We never met a soul there, except for the one day we rescued a man who had got lost; we were in the garage playing darts when we heard him shouting for help – a trick of marsh acoustics, since, when we eventually got to him, he was well over a mile away.

  My father didn’t often come out in the canoe. I think he was worried that the exertion of paddling would overtax his heart. That day, though, it was clear and warm and I managed to persuade him to come out with me. Instead of heading for the Broad we went along the narrow dyke that ran by the edge of our property – the only way of getting there, since the marsh was too boggy and treacherous to walk on. It would have been about four hundred yards from our house, no more. To my astonishment, the low, overshadowed dyke had been transformed into a broad water avenue, and it only took a moment to see why: about a dozen trees on our side of the bank had been cut down. I was surprised and curious; my father was aghast. We cancelled the excursion and quickly went home. A few days later I was back at university. Very soon after that I heard that my parents had put our house on the market and were planning to move.

  What had happened was that a few locals had cut the trees down to provide access to the Broad for a mooring down past our property. They knew the trees belonged to us, and had cut them down without asking, for the straightforward reason that if they had asked Bill might have said no. Quite a few people knew what was happening, but they chose not to tell Bill. After all, he had had the house for a mere eleven years and had been living there full time for only three.

  The resulting feeling of betrayal was, for Bill, very sharp. People with whom he was on nodding and chatting terms had, he felt, done something behind his back. He had a deep sense of insecurity about the locals’ untrustworthiness; he felt a lack of goodwill. So he got an apology from the parish council and sold the house and moved to Norwich, which is where my parents were living by the time of my next holiday from university, over Christmas and New Year.

  I went home in the second week in December. My mother had gone to Ireland for a week, so my father and I had a few days alone together. I had gone home in some triumph, having just won a university prize exam, and Dad was very proud and happy – remember, his own finals result had been the worst day of his life. He was very glad to be in the city. ‘It was only when we got here that I realised that I was just so fucking bored,’ he said. ‘You can go out for a drink, you can go for a coffee, you can go see a film. In the countryside there’s just nothing to do.’ We went to see Peter Weir’s film, The Year of Living Dangerously, and he said it was uncanny how it caught what Indonesia had been like in the 1950s and 1960s. We had dinner together on Wednesday night. On Thursday, my mother came back from Ireland and my girlfriend came to stay for a few days. On Friday, my parents went out for a drink after dinner and came back at about nine. My girlfriend and I were watching Polanski’s film Repulsion when my father went out of the room. He was gone for about half an hour. My mother went to see what he was doing. She screamed my name. I ran upstairs and saw her standing over my father. ‘I think he’s died,’ she said. My first feeling was a great surge of tenderness for her: I felt so sad for her. Not him, not me �
� her. I knelt down beside her. She was right: my father was not cold, but not live-warm. He had had a massive heart attack.

  His cremation took place a few days later. The turnout was sparse, since Bill had so few connections with Norwich. In Hong Kong we could have filled the cathedral. I can remember those days with a terrible clarity. As far as I could tell, I felt nothing, nothing at all. This wasn’t denial so much as simple inability to locate my feelings. I just didn’t know where they were. And there was so much to do, too. There were phone calls to make, letters to write, probate to arrange, my mother to look after. I wasn’t prepared for anything about death, and one of the things I wasn’t prepared for was the sheer workload.

  This was the first time I was ever impressed by my mother’s religious faith. Her reaction the night my father died was one of pure shock: ‘What am I going to do? What will become of me?’ she kept saying. But by the next day she was deeply, passionately grieving. She told me that she had always thought it would be her who died first. (I never asked why she might have thought that; I saw it as self-dramatisation. It never occurred to me that there might be a reason.) She was able to feel the loss in a way I simply couldn’t, and at the same time I felt this was in some way connected to her ability to see something beyond the loss, a context or meaning provided by her faith. Somehow, because she could see beyond it, she could also see it – that was how it seemed. As for me, partly because the loss of my father seemed so random, so arbitrary and meaningless other than as pure loss, I couldn’t even acknowledge it, much less cope with any of the feelings it brought up. Because I had no way of describing to myself what had happened, on some level it was as if nothing had happened. It was as if I knew I had a pair of keys somewhere, and knew that they would be in some way useful, but I couldn’t find them. No: it was as if somebody had told me that there was something called a ‘key’ and that these things called ‘keys’ were essential, and that I would surely be able to find them if I looked, but I had no idea where they were or what they looked like or even, really, what they were for – just that somewhere, somehow, there were these things I probably needed.

  A year after my father died, the day before I was due to go back to spend Christmas with my mother, she stepped in front of a car while out shopping and was run over. Her injuries were not serious and she was in hospital only overnight, but after about a week she was still feeling ill so she asked me to call a priest to give her the last rites. Over the phone, the priest explained that this wasn’t something that was done exclusively for the dying; it could be done for ill people to help them feel better, and the official Church name for the ritual was now the Sacrament of the Sick. He came before lunch the next day – a scruffy middle-aged man with stringy, thinning hair who wore a dog collar and a definitively tatty anorak under which he was carrying communion wafers and wine in a small canister like a thermos. Something about his sense of rush and the way he carried the sacraments, and the smell of wine on his breath at ten in the morning from the mass he had already said, and his uncharming, unsocial, hurried manner – something about the practicality and scruffiness of him – made me suddenly realise that he completely believed that what he was doing was an act of magic. He had come to our house to contact supernatural forces as part of his working day. The absence of any trappings and formality and stage setting made it all the more apparent that what was happening here was a piece of magic. I remembered the Church of England priest who had come the year before – ‘Are you Jewish?’ – and I understood for the first time the difference between the Church as an institution that tried to be nice to people, and the Church as a body to which people belonged because they had a living, vivid, strongly felt and daily belief in the supernatural.

  At this point, my mother was still in a cavern of grief. She stayed there for years. She disappeared into it; it swallowed her almost whole. She was still inside it when her own mother, Molly, died in 1988. Julie went to the funeral, but said little about it afterwards. More or less the only consolation of these years was her lack of financial worries, thanks to the pension scheme Bill had designed. He had successfully argued that the bank pension should pay unusually high benefits to widows.

  One of the ways in which Britain has changed for the better in the last twenty years is that it is no longer socially unacceptable to be a widow in quite the way it once was – as if losing your husband were bad form, or as if you had contracted a disfiguring disease, not lethal but embarrassing and best left unacknowledged. Some of the married couples who had been my parents’ friends stopped sending invitations to my mother. I don’t believe this was ever out of conscious cruelty; it was more out of inattention and the fact that they just didn’t think of her, a single, widowed woman, when they were devising social engagements in their couply lives. Other friends tried to keep seeing my mother, but made the, to her, unforgivable error of pitying her – something to which she was highly sensitised, and to which she reacted by cutting off all contact. If she even suspected that someone might pity her, she would not talk to that person ever again. It was as simple and final as that. She severed all ties with Bill’s Aunt Louie after a visit during which Louie said – after eating some boiled ham my mother had cooked – ‘Well, I suppose it was eating heavy food like that which killed him.’ That was characteristically thoughtless of Louie; it was equally characteristic of Julie that she never spoke to her again. When she did begin to pick up the threads of her life once more, she did so partly through collecting friends whom she could help, or than whom she felt better off, or who were nice to her but not patronisingly so. A married couple, the owners of a local Greek café, became two of her closest friends; another was the woman who looked after the practical affairs of the cloistered order of Carmelite nuns at Quidenham Convent; yet another was a widowed doctor in our old village, who was too brisk and brusque to pity anyone. But that was some time in the future. For the moment she mainly just grieved.

  2

  As for me, I stayed at home for six weeks and then went back to college to get on with my final year. I was in a state. My brain was racing – it felt like a machine for generating ideas and insights – but I could hardly sit still long enough to read a single page. In some ways it was the perfect frame of mind for taking exams, given that I had enough raw material in terms of basic reading. As for my feelings, they were lost to me. I knew that something wasn’t right, but had no idea what, or how to put it right. I was basically, I think, still in shock. Mainly I kept feeling a pressing, urgent, desperate need to run away – it wasn’t clear where or to whom, but just to run away. I had vivid fantasies about simply heading down to the railway station and disappearing.

  So the exams came and went, and I had no idea whether I had done brilliantly or terribly. With each one, I spent the first hour of the three-hour paper more or less willing myself, against some unnameable psychic resistance, to begin writing. (I also vowed never to experience that feeling again, and to find a line of work where I wouldn’t encounter it; and I’ve ended up doing a kind of work where I grapple with it every day. As tabloid editors like to say: ‘no’ is just an emotional way of saying ‘yes’.)

  After finals, I stayed in Oxford for a few weeks until the results came out, and it emerged that I had been awarded a first. I had imagined that moment as a surge of redemptive triumph, as something that would make everything all right and cure the sense of waste and loss I had had since my father died. In the days after his death, the sentence ‘there must be no waste’ used to run through my mind over and over again. No waste, no waste, there must be no waste. I had, on some not-conscious level, thought that if I got a first – it turned out, a week later, to be a congratulatory first, i.e. one of the top four in my year – it would somehow be the case that there had been no waste. And therefore everything would be all right. But that was nonsense, because what I had meant, without realising it, was that there must be no loss – and the whole point of loss is that it is loss. Loss is the thing you can’t get back, the tim
e you can’t reverse, the people you love whom you lose.

  I should say here that I don’t really believe in decisions. That’s to say, I think people almost never make decisions, in the sense that a decision involves standing at a fork in the road, thinking which path would be best to take, and then taking it. Usually what happens is you bumble along, until something happens that makes you look back and realise, hang on, that was a fork in the road, and I went off in this direction instead of the other one. Normally we don’t make decisions, we just do what feels necessary, inevitable. It’s like splitting up with someone: you don’t sit down and think it through and decide; it’s just that circumstances mount up and you realise that you can’t stay, that it’s over, that you already have split up, and that you can’t stay put for a second longer without suffocating. By my lights, that’s not really a decision – it’s just what has to happen next.

  So after the exams, I didn’t decide to stay on at university – I just stayed on at university. Most of my contemporaries went off to do other things, things which, I soon realised, were more interesting, better paid, and much, much more connected to the wider world than being a graduate student. By staying put to do the next thing academically I was, I thought, staying in the broad mainstream of life, the way I always had by taking the next academic challenge, from since I was about ten. But instead, I slowly realised, I had headed off up a weird tributary, uninhabited and overgrown and isolated.

  This isolation wasn’t literal: I was living with a group of friends in a shared house in Old Marston, a village just outside the Oxford city perimeter with a couple of hundred inhabitants and several pubs – the latter because we were in south Oxfordshire, where pub closing time was eleven p.m., whereas a mere hundred yards or so away was Oxford city, where closing time was ten-thirty. My friends were trying to set up an experimental theatre company. They were lively and busy and idealistic and they worked hard. I wasn’t lonely. But I was lost. The structure of essays and exams had gone: now I had all day, every day, to try and fill with the mysterious activity called writing a thesis, a fifty-thousand-word formal essay on – I no longer remember how I cooked this up, or what I was thinking – ‘Rhetoric and Diction in Three English Poets of the 1590s’. I had no idea why I was doing this, and no real interest in it, and I was gradually realising that anyway I didn’t want to be an academic. In fact, graduate work, which I had assumed was a logical continuation of undergraduate work, was something close to its opposite. Instead of being structured, with regular short pieces being produced, and evaluated, against tight deadlines, it was completely formless: I saw my supervisor only every few months, and had no other contact or support of any kind from the university. I would sit in the pub or college bar with other graduate students, as we all did a fair bit, and agree that it was like having disappeared off the cliff at the edge of the world in some primitive cosmogony.